Your stakeholders signed off on your content strategy. They reviewed user data, customer pain points, and company goals. You have focused content themes for upcoming quarters, and a solid distribution plan.
Now, it’s up to you to get it done.
Building a content marketing workflow isn’t intuitive. Creating, editing, approving, and publishing content involves a lot of different people and processes.
While 92% of content marketers say they use content marketing, only 42% say they’re effective at it. If you don’t have a streamlined system in place to manage these people and processes, you won’t be able to execute, regardless of how great your strategy.
In this post, we’ll take a deeper dive into one of the very first steps to take when building your content marketing workflow: identifying asset needs.
Make an Asset List
To get started, make an asset list of all of the content associated with your campaigns. Include everything from larger content pieces like eBooks (what we call content pillars) to smaller, supporting assets like blog posts and outbound emails. Once you’ve identified all of your assets, organize your list into categories by type:
Identify Needs
Once all of your assets are listed and organized, identify the tasks that need to be completed in order to produce each piece of content.
Major content assets like eBooks require more attention. While needs will differ from organization to organization, here are a few fundamental tasks just about every marketer will need to tackle when creating a content pillar.
Sample Content Pillar Workflow
- Identify business objective
- Identify budget
- Identify persona
- Assign asset owner
- Assign deadline
- Identify SEO keywords
- Identify graphic/video needs
- Decide on freelancer involvement and budget
- Establish a promotion strategy and distribution channels
- Draft copy
- Edit copy
- Get final approval
- Publish content
But eBooks aren’t the only assets that need a streamlined workflow. It’s important to identify needs for the supporting content, too. Again, needs will vary based on your internal team structure, but here are a few examples of supporting asset workflows.
Don’t see the content type you’re looking for? Grab more workflow templates here.
Sample Outbound Email Workflow
Building Your Content Workflow Part 1: Identify Content Needs by @lizkoneill
- Define call to action (CTA)
- Submit copy
- Edit copy
- Get final approval
- Set up in email system
- Publish
Sample Blog Post Workflow
- Define CTA
- Submit copy
- Edit copy
- Get final approval
- Add photos/graphics
- Complete SEO information
- Publish content
- Schedule social media promotion
As you list out tasks for each new campaign, you’ll probably notice a pattern—especially among content of the same type. In the next blog post in the “Building Your Content Marketing Workflow” series, I’ll reveal how to uncover these recurring tasks, and give you tips on how to create a workflow template, rather than reinventing the wheel each time.